Agreement or indicating verbs?

[Joe Martin]

Likewise I agree that it has major implications. It seems to me that all
Scott Liddell is doing is asking us to (once again) redefine our notion of
what language is.  :-)
The only counterargument that seems possible is that those "words" with
infinite formational parameters are linguistic--which abandons the
requirement for duality of patterning, I suspect.

In any case, there is no question that a) the physical location in space
of a referent is a non-linguistic piece of data. b) this location is
important and interacts in some crucial way with syntactic structures.
Nor is it limited to only signed languages; this linking of Lx and non-Lx
elements occurs in most "shifters," i.e. the English sentences "What is
that?" or "I know him" are effectively meaningless without some type of
indicating gesture.

So Scott is asking us to make up our minds--either diectic gestures are
linguistic, as claimed by the Sign camp, or they are non-linguistic, as
claimed by the Spoken camp. We can't have it both ways.

Joe Martin
Plain Old Ordinary Student
Western Washington U
Top Left Corner, USA
........................................................

On Tue, 18 May 1999, Adam Schembri wrote:

> At the recent TISLR conference in Washington D.C., I missed the paper by
> Scott Liddell "Indicating verbs: Pointing away from agreement" in which he
> argued that agreement verbs are more appropriately known as "indicating
> verbs" because the use of space in these signs is the product of some fusion
> of a linguistic sign with a deictic gesture (and thus loci are not morphemic
> elements and cannot strictly speaking been seen as inflections for
> agreement). His argument strikes me as fairly persuasive and full of
> enormous implications for our understanding of signed languages, but I
> believe there was some heated discussion after his presentation in which
> many of those present took issue with these claims. Would anyone who was
> there, or who feels strongly about Liddell's analysis of agreement verbs and
> the use of space, care to outline what some of the counter-arguments to this
> proposal might be? Is there any published work which responds to Liddell?
>
> Adam
>
> _____________________________________________________________
>
> Adam Schembri
> Renwick College
> Private Bag 29
> Parramatta NSW
> 2124 AUSTRALIA
> Ph (voice/TTY): (61 2) 9872 0303
> Fax: (61 2) 9873 1614